Bacon eBook

Thus, at last, at the age of fifty-two, Bacon had
gained the place which Essex had tried to get for
him at thirty-two. The time of waiting had been
a weary one, and it is impossible not to see that it
had been hurtful to Bacon. A strong and able
man, very eager to have a field for his strength and
ability, who is kept out of it, as he thinks unfairly,
and is driven to an attitude of suppliant dependency
in pressing his claim on great persons who amuse him
with words, can hardly help suffering in the humiliating
process. It does a man no good to learn to beg,
and to have a long training in the art. And further,
this long delay kept up the distraction of his mind
between the noble work on which his soul was bent,
and the necessities of that “civil” or
professional and political life by which he had to
maintain his estate. All the time that he was
“canvassing” (it is his own word) for office,
and giving up his time and thoughts to the work which
it involved, the great Instauration had to
wait his hours of leisure; and his exclamation, so
often repeated, Multum incola fuit anima mea,
bears witness to the longings that haunted him in
his hours of legal drudgery, or in the service of
his not very thankful employers. Not but that
he found compensation in the interest of public questions,
in the company of the great, in the excitement of
state-craft and state employment, in the pomp and
enjoyment of court life. He found too much compensation;
it was one of his misfortunes. But his heart
was always sound in its allegiance to knowledge; and
if he had been fortunate enough to have risen earlier
to the greatness which he aimed at as a vantage-ground
for his true work, or if he had had self-control to
have dispensed with wealth and position—­if
he had escaped the long necessity of being a persistent
and still baffled suitor—­we might have had
as a completed whole what we have now only in great
fragments, and we should have been spared the blots
which mar a career which ought to have been a noble
one.

The first important matter that happened after Bacon’s
new appointment was the Essex divorce case, and the
marriage of Lady Essex with the favourite whom Cecil’s
death had left at the height of power, and who from
Lord Rochester was now made Earl of Somerset.
With the divorce, the beginning of the scandals and
tragedies of James’s reign, Bacon had nothing
to do. At the marriage which followed Bacon presented
as his offering a masque, performed by the members
of Gray’s Inn, of which he bore the charges,
and which cost him the enormous sum of L2000.
Whether it were to repay his obligations to the Howards,
or in lieu of a “fee” to Rochester, who
levied toll on all favours from the King, it can hardly
be said, as has been suggested, to be a protest against
the great abuse of the times, the sale of offices
for money. The “very splendid trifle, the
Masque of Flowers,” was one form of the many
extravagant tributes paid but too willingly to high-handed
worthlessness, of which the deeper and darker guilt
was to fill all faces with shame two years afterwards.